A Brief Note on Incorporeal Machines

One of the major innovations of Onto-Cartography is the introduction of incorporeal machines. While incorporeal machines were already implicit in my treatment of Luhmann in The Democracy of Objects, I wanted to make this more explicit in Onto-Cartography so as to account for how a machine-oriented ontology might think about signs, discourses, narratives, etc. I draw the concept of incorporeal machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s account of expression and content in “The Geology of Morals” and “Postulates of Linguistic” chapters of A Thousand Plateaus (they also discuss it in Kafka, and Deleuze uses it to organize his reading of Foucault in Foucault). Drawn from Hjelmslev’s glossematics, but significantly reworked to articulate a general, ontological schema, Deleuze and Guattari are careful to argue that the planes of content and expression are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, functioning according to different principles. In other words, content cannot be equated with the “signified” and expression with the “signifier”. Both signifier and signified are variants of expression. They don’t belong to the plane of content at all.

Under Deleuze and Guattari’s account, the plane of content is composed entirely of bodies– what I call corporeal machines –affecting and being affected by one another. The relationship of a smith to his hammer and anvil, for example, belong to the plane of content. The way in which the interaction of these three machines affect one another differs from the way in which signifiers affect bodies. The perpetual hammering on the metal of the anvil produces corporeal changes in the smith’s body. His muscle structure, bone structure, and way of holding himself change over time. This is not the result of expression or signs.

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The plane of expression, by contrast, is the domain of signs. These signs– what I call incorporeal machines –can be of the linguistic or non-linguistic variety and extend into the animal and, more recently, the technological realm. Deleuze and Guattari claim that expression brings about incorporeal transformations in corporeal machines. What does this mean? When material beings interact with expressive machines, nothing physical or material changes in their being, but how other beings relate to these machines that have undergone an incorporeal transformation does change. When a person is found guilty of a felony, nothing physical has changed about their being as a corporeal machine, but their social status has changed. They’ve gone from being an ordinary citizen to being a felon. This brings about all sorts of changes in what they can and cannot do. Take Lacan’s famous doors from “The Agency of the Letter” in Ecrits. There is nothing materially or corporeally different about these doors, but the signifiers “ladies” and “gentleman” introduces a semiotic difference that, in turn, transforms how we relate to these doors. Now we only go through one door. The doors have undergone an incorporeal transformation. So the key point with expression is that it changes nothing in the material being of a corporeal machine, but does change how we interact with that machine. Our smith, of course, was submitted to all sorts of incorporeal machines pertaining to metallurgy as a discourse when he underwent his training.

So what’s valuable for the machine-oriented ontologist in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of expression and content? First, in emphasizing that these two planes are autonomous, we are able to retain the insights of various semiotically and semiologically driven models of inquiry without reducing corporeal bodies to how they are signified. In other words, we avoid the perils of linguistic and semiotic idealism, while still retaining the analysis of sign-systems, discourses, narratives, etc. Second, we are able to avoid base/superstructure models of society found in certain forms of Marxist thought, as well as forms of reductivism found in fields like evolutionary psychology and sociology. Because the plane of expression is autonomous and functions according to its own principles, it can’t be treated as a mere effect of the base or of biological hard wiring (a mistaken view of biology anyway).

The two planes, of course, interact in all sorts of complicated ways. Sometimes one of the planes can develop faster than the other such that it is not yet registered by the other plane. Technology might have transformed social relations or contain the potential to do so, for example, while this is not yet registered by the plane of expression. Likewise, the plane of expression can be more advanced than the plane of content as in the case of the Enlightenment, where thought was able to envision a new sort of society, yet social relations lagged behind because of how they were organized by agriculture. Events in the plane of expression can significantly catalyze new vectors at the level of the plane of content. This is the case when governors declare natural disasters, leaders declare war, or activists declare revolution. These incorporeal transformations mobilize bodies in all sorts of ways. Part of the aim of onto-cartography is to map these complex relations, to draw virtual maps of potential alternatives to existing assemblages, and to trace the imbrications of these planes in social systems.

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10 Responses to “A Brief Note on Incorporeal Machines”

Wonderful to see these concerns explored by your steady hand! I’m really looking forward to seeing the long-form results of all this careful exploration.

I’d be curious how you might understand certain “special” codes, like the genetic code or machine code, in the light of this reading of expressivity.

At the “zero” level, doesn’t the distinction between essence and operation have to collapse, or at least does a system not have to fold one onto the another, in order to bootstrap itself (autopoetic reproductive systems, spoken languages, digital computers, etc.)?

To just state the huge naive question directly: how is it even possible to think “ethics” in terms of systems where variably-malleable codes simultaneously define both possibilities of life and interactions between forces? Where it’s simultaneously a matter of (conditioning) the being of the machine, and of specifying modes or “interactions” the machine supports?

In other words: would it not take a reunified art-and-science to grasp the stakes of the ethics of the genetic code? A joyous science capable of integrating an ethico-aesthetics into scientific practices?

Excellent! This really does well at showing and enacting the integrated nature of the work that you are doing. I say this because you are able to preserve the insights of semiotic idealism while negating the idealism in favor of your speculative realism. Thank you for the articulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that there is a plane of expression and a plane of content which are independent and heterogenous. Since I am a fan of Derrida, I just love claims about heterogeneity.

I am still considering your monistic naturalism and am strongly in favor of it. The main reason that I wanted to challenge it was for the sake of heterogeneity, as a matter of fact. Heterogeneity prevents monism right? Does it even make sense to think that there could be some being or beings which are heterogenous with nature?

Those are huge questions! Clearly DNA and whatnot seem to belong to the plane of expression, yet they affect corporeal bodies. I’ll have to think on this more. My strategy has been to argue that there are many intermediaries between types, but that’s not very satisfying. I really like where you’re going with your ethico-aesthetico questions and would like to hear more.

An excellent post, Levi, and I am very interested in these concepts. I’ve been focusing a fair amount on those plateaus as well (along with the one on the refrain, which is also intertwined with expression). One of the complications between content and expression for me is the way that expression can create physical changes, as when I say something that angers you. I suppose, for me, rhetoric begins with the ways in which nonsymbolic expression can produce physical changes: brain activity, for example. A scent might start with a molecule striking a nerve, but it creates an expression (or would you say the message sent from nerve cell to brain is still content?), that then precipitates a feeling (hunger maybe), which then opens an opportunity for action.

Deleuze and Guattari directly address the question of DNA in ATP, but I wonder if we might think differently about the matter now that we have so much more knowledge about genetics.

‘One of the major innovations of Onto-Cartography is the introduction of incorporeal machines.’
Of course as you surely know Guattari uses the term in Chaosmosis:
‘It is as biologists that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela proposed the concept of autopoietic machine in order to define living systems. I think that their notion of autopoiesis, as the auto-reproductive capacity of a structure or eco-system, could be advantageously enlarged to include social machines, economic machines and even the incorporeal machines of language, theory and aesthetic creation. Jazz, for example, is nourished at the same time by its african genealogy and its reactualizations under multiple and heterogeneous forms. As long as it is alive it will be like that. But like any autopoietic machine, it can die through lack of food or drift towards destinies which make it a stranger to itself.’
I am simply curious to know why it is a ‘major innovation’ of Onto-Cartography? Not trollish, simply curious…perhaps I have misunderstood the claim you are making of a ‘major innovation’ – is this yours or D/g’s?
‘ I draw the concept of incorporeal machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s account of expression and content in “The Geology of Morals” and ”Postulates of Linguistic” chapters of A Thousand Plateaus’ (Levi).

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